Religion & Beliefs

Beliefnet has a really stunning photo gallery up right now, called The World at Prayer.  Totally worth a visit to the site. 

The images are from a book called Talking to God: Images of the World at Prayer, which includes text by some major players in the faith-biz— The Dalai Lama, Thomas Merton, Elie Weisel…

And it’s all worth your time… but in particular, I want to mention two aspects of this project:

1. I want to suggest that you take a moment to scroll through the images once quickly, and take note of your own different reactions to each image.  As a way of checking in with your baser instincts.  I’m going to suggest that we think about “faith” differently when it resembles our own more… or less.  I’m going to suggest that you’ll feel a different kind of surge when you see “foreign” faiths” than you’ll feel when you see your own, or something that resembles your own. I’m going to suggest that for some of us, faith is not equal (in a raw, human, way) and that we need to work on our baggage. By which I mean that I need to work on this.  By which I mean that I need to see about addressing my own fascination for “National Geographic” faith, and my own disdain for white American people in  mega churches… 
2. I want to ask what you think about the fact that the Jewish images are all orthodox…  it bugs me, and I wonder if this is all we are to the world. Ancient old men, praying in funny clothes. And I wonder if maybe this happens in reverse, if we, as Jews, imagine all Muslims to be fundamentalist, traditionalist?  Do we imagine all Catholics to be old Italian women?  All Buddhists to be bald monks? Do we all see other religions as caricatures of faith? It’s interesting that these images struck me so hard.  Something amazing about receiving information visually… when I spend so much time reading/thinking in an academic way.

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